


i took my own little piece

by HybridComplex



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Blood, Gen, Surgery, glow porn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-19
Updated: 2013-03-19
Packaged: 2017-12-05 20:38:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/727680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HybridComplex/pseuds/HybridComplex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The insistent thoughts may have come from gazing at the brightness of her insides during a CAT scan when she was seven.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i took my own little piece

**Author's Note:**

  * For [aisu10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aisu10/gifts).



She’s always wanted to shine like a star but got caught in Tony’s shadow. It’s not a place she minded being, not until he came home thin and battered with the moon inside his chest. It makes her angry and later the tower makes her angrier so she goes behind his back, falsifies request forms and idea submissions until an entire floor of R&D is working for her without knowing it.

When it’s ready, she stops breathing, excited flutters taking over her chest and belly. She briefly thanks the universe for morally ambiguous surgeons as she pulls on the papery hospital gown. It’s more for show than anything else or perhaps they’re going to use it to mop up the blood. She pauses, tilts her head, and then sits decisively on the edge of the table, lets the muscles of her upper body go lax as a nurse prepares the injection.

It numbs her chest entirely and she feels unbalanced for a moment without the sensation of her heart beating but settles into it quickly, locks her eyes on the screen near her head. The first cut brings with it the sound of tearing fabric and a rush of anticipation colored by the blood that runs down the side of her chest, almost meets the smooth metal surface before the nurse swipes at it with a messy swab of cotton.

The ripping sound comes again and again until they pull the flesh back, weigh the ends down with heavy forceps, drag fingers along her sternum and ribs to check for damage. Her bones are bright white where the blood is wiped away but she wants them to shine golden.

As one surgeon begins to cut a hole into the bone at the center of her chest, another grabs up the mechanism. It looks enormous but she knows it will fit, hidden away behind her sternum, just beneath the hole-to-be. She watches as it’s pushed up beneath her ribs through a slit cut into her diaphragm, knows the forceps holding it are cold but doesn’t feel it even against the heat of her insides.

Everything is a blur after that, the insertion of the device into her ribcage and the coating of metal around the hole in her chest that dips down some, a shallow imitation of the arc reactor’s casing.

She watches them sew her back up but hardly registers it, just as she’d hardly noticed the nurse prepping the IV with the sedatives and painkillers.

When she wakes she’s strapped down to the bed in the next room and she bares her teeth at the camera even though she expected it. She considers the padded straps, huffs, lifts her head off the pillow to peer down at her chest. She’s stitched back together loosely, can already see the edge of one slice swelling up and pulling the stitches tight.

She aches but presses forward anyway, to the small mound of raised flesh above her left breast, manages to touch her chin to it before falling back with a soft pant. The ceiling lights up with orange and gold and the shadows of ribs and lungs and heart and she grins and laughs and cries because this is what she’s always wanted.

A star inside her chest.


End file.
